


Time Will Tell

by teyla



Series: Human!Verse (Ten/Simm!Master) [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Human Doctor (Doctor Who), Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Roleplaying Character, Roleplaying Universe, Time Lord Angst, Time Lord culture, introspective, it's the TARDIS who died, time sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 02:36:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9215027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teyla/pseuds/teyla
Summary: Recently human, the Doctor thinks about time.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in a RP universe developed by [AllesKlara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllesKlara/pseuds/AllesKlara) and myself back in ~2009. In it, the Master (Simm, post-Last of the Time Lords) uses a modified Chameleon Arch to strip the Doctor's (Ten) Time Lord essence and turn him human permanently while retaining the Doctor's memory.
> 
> Having lost the mental connection to the Doctor, the TARDIS powers herself down and turns herself into a fobwatch (a.k.a. dies). The Doctor, being human and lacking a time sense, doesn't know that the fobwatch is the TARDIS.
> 
> This was posted to LJ in 2009 and crossposted here (with some edits) for safekeeping.

Considering the fact that every Time Lord possesses a time sense, the Doctor realizes that to an outsider, it might seem surprising that the people of Gallifrey developed a device like the watch at all. However, realism on Earth is similarly remarkable. Most humans can see, and yet, realistic paintings enjoy great popularity among them.

At all Time Lord Academies, Time Adepts were taught about the universal history of time and timepieces. For years, they learned about the different ways of telling time on the different planets in the universe, observed races not blessed with a time sense struggling to bring order to a chaotic cosmos--an order that every Time Lord can recognize intuitively, just like every human blessed with sight can intuitively recognize shapes and forms.

Watch-making was just a small part of the mostly academic unit on time telling, but the Doctor remembers it as one of his favourite subjects. Imitating other races imitating the order of the universe in an imperfect model of the original every Time Lord can see when closing their eyes--it fascinated him. It still does. Watches are time made tangible. Making a watch, it's like touching a scent.

Just like a realistic painting, a watch is easily identified as an imitation of reality by an individual with a time sense. Watches don't tell _real_ time. They tell an aspect, the part of time that's important to the owner of the watch. Even that most watches do imperfectly. If you don't have a time sense, you need to watch your watch and watch your time to make sure they're in sync. If they're not, you're lost. You need to find another watch that expresses the same aspect of time your watch was expressing before you can fix your watch.

The Doctor used to love watches as pieces of art. He never realized how deceitful they are when you have to rely on them on a daily basis.

He has taken to carrying three watches on him at all times. One is a wrist watch. It's a narrow silver strip circling his left wrist, with a small display embedded that shows six numbers--hours, minutes, seconds. Sometimes, he watches the steady changing of the two numbers indicating the seconds, trying to count the milliseconds in his head. Point one, point two, point three, point four, point five, but he can't count faster than that, so he's taken to counting in twos--point two, point four, point six, and so on.

The second one is his pulse. It's not a watch per se, it's not _visible_ , but it's tangible. He can feel his single pulse when he touches his wrist. He knows that his average, human heart beat lies at around seventy beats per minute, so he can count and add up and measure time that way. It's shoddy and inefficient, but he can't lose his pulse or forget it or have it taken away. When his pulse stops, time will stop, too. For him, anyway.

The third watch he carries with him at all times is his fobwatch. He knows it's not _his_ fobwatch, the watch that he made as a young Adept at the Prydonian Academy. That watch is now the watch of a young man who went to war and was made old by the time he measured with the watch the Doctor gave him. It looks the same, though. Exactly the same, which shouldn't be possible, because even Professor Yana's watch was slightly different. The Doctor should know; he made that one as well. Watch-making had been a bit of a hobby for a while back at the Academy.

The watch he made for himself he left with a boy so it would make sure he would become a man; there isn't a second one like it. But the fobwatch he carries on him at all times is the same, right down to the carvings on the lid; Gallifreyan symbols he imprinted into the metal whose meaning is lost to him now. Maybe he did make this second, identical watch, after all. A part of him must have.

It doesn't tell the time, not consistently. According to the fobwatch, it's always ten past midnight, provided you apply the space coordinates the watch displays on a smaller dial integrated in the clock face. The Doctor finds it harder and harder to do so. He's pretty sure that in a couple of weeks, the memories of how to read the watch will be gone completely, and the aspect of time it's telling will be incomprehensible to him.

When he realizes this inevitability, he stops opening the watch. But he still carries it with him wherever he goes. This fobwatch is still a piece of art to him. Its style, however, is a lot less comprehensible than realism.


End file.
